How Art Can Make You Happy

Which is not to say that all art looks like the world, or even that all art is inspired by physical reality. Of course it doesn’t and isn’t. And we’ll get to all of that in just a moment. Nor is any of this to say that art is a utility. Feeling glum? Throw the art switch! No. That’s not how it works. One of the greatest properties of art is that it’s not for anything. It’s not there to make you feel better. Indeed, it may unsettle you, make you feel worse. But it will almost always make you feel (even if what you feel is that this particular art is not for you). And, if you let it, it will almost always make you see. And seeing is what it’s all about

“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
–ANDY WARHOL

Yes, art is magical. Studies show that looking at art stimulates, among other things, the motor cortex, the part of your brain that controls your body’s movements. When you look at art you don’t just see it with your eyes or feel it with your brain, you also feel it with your whole body. Quite literally: Every fiber of your being—your senses, your intellect, your emotions, even your physical corpus—responds to works of art. So that right there is pretty much the first magical property of art. It zings through you like a bolt of lightning.

We’ve all heard it said so many times that liking this or that thing—jazz, white walls, dry white wine—marks us out as smart and sophisticated that we have a really hard time not believing it. But deep down we know what we like and what we don’t like—the same way we know whether we like or dislike mushrooms.

Make no mistake. All this talk about art making you happy doesn’t mean it will always make you feel good. You will be shaken up. You will be unsettled. You will even be afraid, and sad, and ashamed, and angry. You might occasionally want to barf.

“To be modern is to let imagination and invention do a lot of the work once done by tradition and ritual.”

–ADAM GOPNIK

We’re all limited. Terribly, unavoidably limited. We are limited by the time and place and society we were born into—limited by race and class and gender assumptions, limited by privilege, limited by lack of privilege, limited by things we were taught as children, limited by language, limited by the range of light our human eyeballs can sense, limited by a million things we can do relatively little—if indeed anything—to alter. So, yeah, limited to an almost tragic degree. Each and every one of us, every single day.